WW5: Ah, Motherland!

IN MY SKIN

In 1988 I emigrated with my family from El Salvador to the United States – I was eight. We carried with us nothing but a small duffel bag each, the clothes on our backs, and our very own skin. Embedded on my skin I carried traces of the rivers I bathed in as a young child, the waves that had crashed against my back and had tried to pull me into the ocean when they drifted back in, the dirt and earth that I still carried under my fingernails. I also carried in my skin the inheritance from my grandmothers, memories of the land, its history of bloodshed, and the dreams of all the people I was leaving behind stuck in a civil war.

Arriving to the United States we were classified as “illegal aliens” and “immigrants”. I had landed in a country where I was not accepted. However, this was to be my home now so I had no choice but to adapt. I was twenty-one when I travelled back to my homeland and realized that the country I had left behind no longer existed as I remembered it. I did not fit in there and I felt like a foreigner in my own country. Which side was home then?

I have since discovered that Earth is my Mother and that my Skin is my Land, and that I Only Reside in my Skin. During the Wonder Women residency I worked on a new series of photographs in which I created a new found land composed of landscapes from my country superimposed onto parts of my body. I photographed myself against slides I had shot during my first visit back to El Salvador merging me once again with my homeland. With this project I re-discovered the memories embedded in my skin. I also re-appropriated my body as my land, one that I carry with me no matter which country I reside in.

Hi girls!

i dont have any new pictures to show. but i’ve been scanning the polaroids in super high res and found out i can make them up to 40″x50″ big. and after seeing the post from chris, i still want to see them big.

anyway, all i have to share is this link to a poem i found that i thought was beautiful and relates a lot to our projects – liz’s, pam’s, willa’s and all of us because most of our mothers are from a different land.

Mother, Two Tongues

How does your work transcend borders and create new ideals of what it means to be American/immigrant/mixed heritage” (whichever way you self identify)?

I create my own personal landscapes to create a home that is my own within me and to transcend the physical borders of land and country. We immigrants and descendants of immigrants are always the “other” existing between two worlds divided by national borders. Through this project, I am attempting to eradicate these borders for myself and hopefully inspire the viewer that is dealing with similar issues to find their personal resolution.  In telling my own personal story as someone who was at one point an illegal immigrant, I am attempting to humanize the “alien” to the audience that isn’t dealing with this issue.

Roxana, I wanted to show you these, and I thought the exhibition book might be a good resource in general. These are some composite photos by  Anthony Goicolea in the exhibition catalog of Badlands: New Horizons in Landscape that was held at MASS MoCA.  I go back to this book often when thinking about my own work.

Roxana

I have a slide projector. It’s old but it works. I can bring it, the carousel that holds 80 slides and a single slide viewer on Sunday if you want.

hi everyone, i was wondering if anyone has access to a slide projector? for my project i want to project the landscapes onto my skin directly instead of doing double exposures because i would then have more control of the image. let me know if you or anyone you know has a slide projector i can borrow.

Also Pam, I found this photographer’s work that made me think of your project. She calls it a journal in progress and she shoots a polaroid a day and this is how she presents it.

http://www.suzanneszucs.com/support/pages/Journal_movie.html